 | I apologize for my lack of updates, but today is quite a day to resume! Merry Christmas to all. I decided before beginning with my Christmas festivities, I would reminisce a bit on a Christmas from thirteen years ago, when I was a young seventeen year old in AP English at BMC Durfee High School. One of our assignments was to create a Christmas story for children; for extra credit, we were to read it to children at schools throughout the city. |
The story and artwork I created encapsulated so much that I found endearing up to that point: Yoshi's Island, The Little Prince, Donkey Kong Country 2, and The Phantom Tollbooth were all influences in both my tale (and if you notice, I did borrow quite a bit of the art from The Phantom Tollbooth). The technology I utilized was primitive, even for then, but I embraced it. I used my 566 MHz eMachines with 64 mb of RAM and a 20 GB hard drive and a Celeron processor, a set of watercolors, crayolas, a UMAX Astra scanner (pretty decent, actually),a CD-RW, an HP laser jet, and very basic photo editing software from the 1990s to create my book. I do not have fond memories of the experience at all,--the computer froze constantly, it was slow, the CD-RW was unreliable, and my artistic ability was almost non-existent (yes, my Lenovo Yoga 900 with nearly 300x the memory would have made it a much more pleasant process). But I created something that means more to me now than it did then. I stowed it away, never intending for others to see it...but, it's time. So here it is:
I do apologize for the low-res, crooked scans…and I do apologize that the book is far from professional…but, regardless, these pages capture something significant. The story is less a tale of Christmas and more a declaration of my greatest fears. There was a fear, I recognize now, that I somehow wasn’t worthy enough to those who meant the most to me. It’s a fear that many of us face. So during this Christmas season, when you’re enjoying your shiny Lenovo Yogas and iPhones, do not forget that there is something far more meaningful to the season. And to Mr. Tavares, who has since passed, thank you again for teaching an English class that went beyond analyzing Hamlet and memorizing rules of grammar.
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